WALID SABA

When Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at semiconductor manufacturer Marvell, needed to familiarize some new engineering hires with one of the challenges facing their industry, he borrowed a bunch of LEGO blocks from his kids. He presented the group with a select number of mismatched blocks. The pieces, Kuemerle explained to his new initiates, were meant to represent different chips with particular functions.

Many clocks contain musical mechanisms: table clocks, standing clocks, longcase clocks, flute-playing clocks, and pocket watches. Automaton figures, furniture (e.g. desks), jewelry, as well as picture clocks sometimes also have built-in musical mechanisms. For the musical program, historical systems used different sound recording media: pinned cylinder, perforated disc, perforated cardboard tape, and perforated paper roll were widely used.

“Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves.”1 Considerable effort in software research and practice is spent on bugs. Finding bugs, reporting and tracking them, triaging them, attempting to fix them automatically, detecting “bug smells”—these comprise a substantial portion of large projects’ time and development costs, and are a significant subject of study for researchers in software engineering, programming languages, security, and beyond. But, what is a bug, exactly?